The field of the disclosure is ophthalmic devices for administering beneficial agents.
Contact lenses for administering ophthalmic drugs and other beneficial agents to the ocular tissue of a patient have been described. For example, the anionic contact lens material, etafilcon A, has been used in clinical studies to deliver or administer ketotifen, an anti-allergy drug used in the treatment of allergic conjunctivitis (see ClinicalTrials.gov NCT00569777). A problem associated with some ocular delivery devices is that they can be limited in the type of beneficial agent that the device is capable of administering. Another problem associated with some ocular drug delivery devices is that they involve complex manufacturing methods which are not amenable to large-scale manufacturing operations. We have discovered improved methods of manufacturing beneficial agent-releasing contact lenses that address these problems.
Contact lens packages including a sealed receptacle that contains a contact lens made of a silicone hydrogel copolymer in a sterile solution which comprises a stabilizing agent which can form an ionic complex or hydrogen bond with the hydrogel copolymer, have been described in U.S. Pat. Publ. No. 2007/0149428. A packaging system and method for the storage of an ionic hydrogel lens that uses an aqueous packing solution which includes a phosphorylcholine polymer, and which further can include a buffering agent, have been described in U.S. Pat. Publ. No. 2009/0100801. Other background publications include U.S. Pat. Publ. No. 2008/0085922, U.S. Pat. Publ. No. 2007/0265247, U.S. Pat. Publ. No. 2007/20100239637, U.S. Pat. Publ. No. 2008/0124376, U.S. Pat. No. 7,841,716, Karlgard et al, Int J Pharm (2003) 257:141-51 and Soluri et al., Optom Vis Sci (2012) 89:1140-1149.